Volunteer Spotlight – Marshall Katz

Marshall and his family

at his daughter's College Graduation

This
month’s volunteer spotlight focuses on KehilaLinks contributor Marshall Katz, a
retired GS-13 of the U.S. Government, a retired USAF Reserve Chief Master
Sergeant (E-9), and recipient of both the U.S. Civilian and the USAF
Meritorious Service medals. He is married to Helen E. Fields of Pittsburgh, and has a
daughter, Lena.

His
involvement in JewishGen started when he decided to research his family history
in Sub-Carpathia. Through JewishGen, he was able to make a connection with a
man in Michigan
whose family was from the same shtetl in Ukraine---Klyucharki
(Várkulcsa)---and, coincidentally, also from the same hometown in Pennsylvania. This man
has a relative who still lives in Klyucharki and with whom Marshall visits.

Since
his retirement, Marshall, who is self-taught creating web sites, has
applied his talents to creating KehilaLinks pages for
the villages and towns in which our ancestors once lived. Working 12-15 hours a
day, he has created 120 KehilaLinks web sites, focusing on Sub-Carpathia, Ukraine,
Hungary,
USA,
Slovakia
and Romania.

He also
spearheaded the effort to establish JewishGen’s newest Special Interest Group –
Sub-Carpathia SIG
– in 2011, by creating a web site "portal" for the JewishGen
Sub-Carpathia SIG which routinely receives visitors from around the world,
currently from 84 countries and all 50 U.S. states.

As an active member of the Sub-Carpathia
expat community, Marshall
attends picnics and events both in the USA and in Israel, helping
to promote JewishGen and the JewishGen Sub-Carpathia SIG.

Marshall makes himself available to help people in their Jewish
genealogy research. This past spring, he was able to help a Holocaust survivor
determine the birth-date of her recently deceased husband. A different time, he
received an email from a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, who, for various
reasons, never saw her grandparents' tombstones in Berehove (Beregszász). Marshall was able to
locate the grave, and send a photo to the survivor.

It is not surprising that Marshall routinely
receives emails from researchers who had success as a direct result of Marshall’s efforts.

He has
visited the Sub-Carpathia, Ukraine
region frequently and has been instrumental in collecting information about its
numerous villages and towns, in order to create KehilaLink web sites to benefit
all researchers with an ancestral connection to Sub-Carpathia. He documents his
trips and, once back home, sends out a trip report to subscribers to the
Sub-Carpathia SIG (and other) mail lists. Links to his most recent trip reports
(2011 & 2012) can be found here.SEE "Travel Planning," then "Trip
Reports."

Marshall is also a board member
of "The Shalom Foundation," is active in the Zembo Shrine Antique Car
unit, and has spearheaded The Packard Automobile Club (PAC) web site presence
on the Internet. His 1940 Packard Limousine took "Best of Show" in
1997.Marshall commented, "In
retirement, despite the amount of time and work involved, I derive great
pleasure in creating Kehilalinks for researchers today and for future
generations to come."

Susana
Leistner Bloch, JewishGen VP for KehilaLinks said it best: "It is a
pleasure to work with Marshall
and I wish there were more people like him dedicated to memorializing and
commemorating Jewish Communities."

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to JewishGen for this honor of being selected for a volunteer spotlight. Through my KehilaLink work, it is hoped that the once flourishing Jewish communities, decimated by the Shoah, are never forgotten. My success is largely due to descendents world-wide, and other interested people, providing content to make the web sites meaningful for researchers today and for future researchers.

Special thanks to Warren Blatt, Susana Bloch and Avraham Groll for their support and encouragement.

Happy Pesach to you too.I am new at this and I have a official document from Nov-sad Yugoslavia. My Grandparents were Hungarian but I believe it is in German. The file is too large to post on view mate and if reduce the size it will not be readable. Any suggestions?

He is the BEST, never too busy to answer my emails, and he also has a sense of humor, which is a gift. Have a wonderful Pesach Marshall with family and friends, and continue your work in good healthHelen Ganz Kastenbaum

Marshall was extremely helpful in my initial efforts to set up a KehilaLinks page for Kezmarok, Slovakia. His honor is well deserved and I wish him more years of productive efforts!Regards,Madeleine Isenberg

I have e-mailed Marshall personally numerous times to thank him for his wonderful work in setting up the Kehila links and am happy to have this opportunity to thank him publicly. Also, Marshall's reports of his trips are thorough, descriptive, and very helpful to us all. Thank you again, Marshall. You're a hero!

Through your efforts in creating webpages dedicated to Sub-Carpathian Jewish communities, their lives and all information available about them will serve as a memorial and a valuable resource for their descendants, now and in the future.

My congratulations to you for an honor well-deserved. You have been so helpful to me in my planning my trip to Carpathia last year, in helping me to get my ancestral town cemetery cleared of vegetation, and in a variety of other ways. And partly because of you, I've gotten the Carpathia "bug" and am now planning my 2nd trip there in the past year.